Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Tomb Raider 2013 The Game

Lara
Croft has evolved over time from agile, puzzle-solving treasure hunter
into a loot-seeking mass murderer (of bad guys and sharp-toothed
animals) who also solves puzzles. But with the new Tomb Raider,
Crystal Dynamics is re-envisioning the character for present-day
audiences in its upcoming reboot. She’s still going to shoot at various
two-legged and four-legged creatures using an assortment of weapons, but
the hope is that you’ll pick up some sense of the journey that she
takes from wide-eyed wanderer to tough girl adventurer as her gritty
tale of island survival unfolds.

Square Enix offered a new look at
how the March 5, 2013 release is progressing during a recent media
tour, picking up not long after Lara is forced, for the first time in
her life, to kill another human. It’s roughly three hours into the story
and a handful of hub camps – all of which are connected by a fast
travel system – have already been discovered. The latest location sees
Lara hooking back up with Roth, the captain of the wrecked ship that
stranded them both (and others) on the island. He’s also something of a
mentor figure to the young Lara.

Roth is freshly injured when the
two meet, following an unfortunate run-in with a wolf that ended with
the beast slipping off with Roth’s food pack. The island may be filled
with wildlife to hunt, but the food pack contained a more important
item: the transmitter from the wrecked ship’s lifeboat. This device is
the best hope that Lara, Roth, and their fellow survivors have of
escaping the Dragon’s Triangle island and the scavengers that make a
life there. It’s somewhere nearby, nestled away in the wolf’s cave.
Roth’s
leg injury prevents him from helping Lara retrieve the transmitter
personally, but he provides some assistance in the form of a sturdy hand
axe. Lara’s key equipment upgrades in Tomb Raider are all
motivated by story events. The cutscene that plays over her reunion with
Roth offers a peek at this young treasure hunter-in-the-making —
“You’re a Croft,” Roth gently reminds her — but it also serves to
justify the arrival of this new tool.

Prior to receiving the hand
axe, Lara’s traversal capabilities are limited to how far up a wall she
can propel herself toward a ledge. The axe allows her to actually scale
vertical surfaces; not every surface in the game, mind you, but
stretches of bare, relatively flat wall. The game’s Survival Instinct
visual overlay highlights climbable surfaces with a golden glow, making
them easy to spot.

The act of retrieving the transmitter sees Lara
exploring the hub space that this chunk of story unfolds in. There are
multiple open world-ish locations like these scattered throughout the
game, and this not-insignificant chunk of world is apparently the
smallest. The area is centered around an unoccupied, makeshift
encampment built at the base of a valley. Mountains loom high all
around, and each obvious point of interest – notably a blinking radio
tower at the top of the highest peak – is accessible with the right
tools. Some tools won’t come Lara’s way until later, and backtracking
players can expect to frequently discover new places to visit in these
familiar locations.Lara
faces down the wolf in a brief, yet frantic QTE and then returns to
Roth, who tells her that she’ll need to get the transmitter up to the
nearby radio tower in order to reach the outside world. So begins a
climb that mixes equal bits of platforming and combat, with a dash of
puzzle-solving thrown in. Lara may be untrained in the ways of survival,
but she is astoundingly agile, to the point that you can even tweak her
direction of movement mid-jump. The path to the radio tower starts
simply enough, with wall climbing, ledge grabbing and the like, but it’s
not long before the path leads into a series of caves and tunnels
populated by the island’s scavengers.

Little is known so far about this antogonistic force in Tomb Raider.
They were on the island long before Lara and her shipwrecked mates
arrived, a good 20-30 years. Surprisingly, there are no children at all
to be found on the island in spite of the length of time that the
scavengers have lived there. It turns out that there’s a very specific
story-related reason for this, but it’s the stuff of spoilers and
therefore not being discussed prior to the game’s release.

Combat
has a very brutal feel to it, with the camera pulling in tight on Lara’s
shoulder whenever her bowstring is drawn back or her gun is brought to
bear. The scavengers are a hardy bunch for this underpowered, early game
version of Lara – skill upgrades improve various player-chosen
attributes over time – absorbing multiple arrows and/or bullets before
they fall. The wisest course in most encounters is to employ stealth and
tactical retreats, luring lone enemies or smaller groups away from the
herd.
A
lengthy stretch of combat eventually spills into the radio tower’s
support facility, with Lara ending up trapped in a room as it slowly
fills with gas while a machine gun-toting scavenger watches her choke on
the other side. There’s some light puzzle-solving to be done here,
first in escaping the room and then in taking care of the scavenger. The
solution leads to another cutscene in which Lara picks up the machine
gun, adding it to her arsenal. Yet again we see an example of the story
motivating an upgrade to the player’s capabilities.

This is what Crystal Dynamics is aiming to do with Tomb Raider.
Lara needs to be redeveloped as a character for a modern audience, but
that means starting her from square one. She’s not exactly useless when
she’s first starting out, but there’s a big difference between a fit and
athletic newcomer to the realities of the real world, and a hardened
thrill-seeker who’s been carved from her experiences. The story unfolds
over a period of weeks rather than years, and the hope is that the
life-or-death situations that players repeatedly overcome as Lara paint a
convincing portrait of her development as a person.

The demo
concludes with Lara reaching the radio tower and scaling it to connect
the transmitter with a maintenance panel at the top of it. Players are
in control through every inch of her ascent, pushing her forward using
the left thumbstick. Once at the top, there are dials in the maintenance
panel to be spun as you search for a clear frequency to transmit on.
This active participation in what could have easily been rendered as a
cutscene speaks to a principal goal for Crystal Dynamics: it’s more
about the journey than the end result. All of us already know where Lara
Croft is headed; Tomb Raider will merely allow us to guide her there for ourselves.